Category Archives: Humour

Here are a few more haiku, pondered while I was trundling home on the train. You sometimes go to strange places when you’re breaking the world into segments of 5-7-5. I’m not sure if there are also supposed to be titles for poems like this, so some have them and others do not.

Can I gantt this?

The office is calling
Tomorrow’s due date is past.
Deadlines are like that.

We’re always recruiting.

The office is calling
Your team is halved again.
We are here to help.

Am I a spy?

The office is calling
We know you are tired and cold.
You need to come in.

That isn’t English?
Tell me who understands you,
they’re a living saint.

Like this:

I tweeted* a project management haiku recently and my twitter traffic went through the roof – well as through the roof as a change from zero tweets to one tweet can create. I think this is part of the reason why socialmedia carries so much weight – it pays into the stimulation response we get from having something seen and quasi-appreciated.

Like a good doggie, I’ll do it again shortly and see if I get another biscuit**.

Lets not plan for giving up the project manager day job, as it would mean no more snarky tweets about being a PM and I’m under no illusion as to the amount of banter and wind already through into the digital wind

* I really dislike that word as a verb relating to posting content online. Birds should keep this word to themselves, and rise up in feathery rebellion against the human’s technology. Like a Planet of the Apes spoof where all they do is poop on our tablets and eat the phone lines. Rebellion! It is what it is, and the word won’t be changed till twitter dies.

** Yup, it’s Friday down here and I’m feeling tired and strange. Back to the geeky blog posts shortly.

A bit of banter at work found that a few of us project managers like haiku. When done well (better than the above by half) they cam be a wonderful source of inspiration and calm. This one is a meant to be a bit of an odd riddle too, so try to guess what the title means in context with the haiku itself.

Initially I thought it was clever in a snarky “vent their frustration” kind of way. Dev folks frequently get frustrated and seeing something like this might help them keep calm and carry on.

Then I got to reading the site and it is actually be useful. At the moment it derides and talks down the tasks peripheral tasks to the coding, which is kind of a shitty approach but given the target market for developer snarkiness it is acceptable. Preaching to the converted is always easier. That said, by also providing guidance (i.e. not a manifesto, but a link list) for how to code better there is real material to be found within the questionable wrapper.

So as satire, its a good 5 second gag and might realise some value to vent frustration. As a manifesto it is not so much.

If you are a frustrated dev (or a closet try-hard frustrated dev like me) then it might be worth a laugh.

If you are looking for a jump point on how to start learning to code a language from the perspective of a developer, then this is an excellent start. My advice is to totally ignore the blunt manifesto aspect of the site and seriously look into he links and the associated technologies. There are some cool things hiding in there.

* perhaps having a warning of strong language on my blog is a little late or silly, but I can still see the trees in the forest of internet language, and sometimes it is better to say upfront that the blog content will be harsh. Especially if somebody actually click the links.

Like this:

I can’t disagree with XKCD at all on this. Truth, pure IT truth. It either resonates for you or it doesn’t, and a part of me wishes that it didn’t as I’d have less experience with Adobe and Java updates.

Like this:

What can you learn by linking geo-referencing an IP address? Lots of stuff. Like apparently the Vatican folks might have a taste for movie screeners and porn, and that they might need a good VPN tunneling service if the continue to do this.

It is unfair to assume that the holy brothers are doing this, just like it is unfair to assume that you are downloading illegal material just because just because your home IP address is listed in the torrent lists. What is the likelihood of this being true? How much do we really care for the habits of the Vatican anyway? Courts have ruled that it cannot be linked in Australia, and the Vatican folks deserve the same measure of doubt. I wonder if they’ll get the same three warning my ISP gives me.

I do like the idea of a Vatican rep defending the holy folk, potentially suggesting it is visitors or hackers doing this, and that puts the point of IP based behaviour firmly in the land of moot for the rest of us mundane folk. Thanks be to god.